【推荐1】Many parents set rules for their children’s online activity, such as limiting (限制) the amount of time they can spend online. But some children in the US and UK are saying that they’d like to make rules for parents, too. Their main complaint? That their parents share too many photos of them online.

In a 2016 study, it was found that parents in the US share an average of 116 photos of their kids after they are born. Most were taken before the child turned 8 years old. Many of the photos showed kids in embarrassing situations, like having food all over their faces, Quartz reported.

Parents do like to share their child’s progress as he or she grows up. But their kids don’t like it as much. In a survey of UK children between the ages of 12 and 16, 70 percent said they felt their parents didn’t respect their online privacy (隐私), according to Digital Parenting magazine.

In addition, many kids said that other students at school sometimes picks on (捉弄) them after their parents post photos online, CBS News noted. In one case, a girl was bullied (欺负) by boys at school after they found her moms’ blogs, which had many family photos.

“Each time a photo or video is uploaded, it creates a digital footprint of a child, which can follow them into adult life, “a spokeswoman for a leading children’s charity in the UK said. “It’s always important to ask children for their permission (允许) before posting photos or videos of them.”

What is sharenting?

There’s a new word English to describe it when parents post pictures of their online—“sharenting”, or a combination of the world “share” and “parenting”.

【推荐3】Most cities were built on rivers. People originally settled in Paris because of the Seine, and in London for the Thames. A third of New York City's surface area is water. For centuries, city folk used rivers for shipping, wastes, fishing and play.

The Industrial Revolution ruined rivers for more than a century. Huge new urban populations overwhelmed them with the pollution from wastes, factories and ships.

In recent decades, rivers lost their industrial function and cities began cleaning them up. The Thames is now the cleanest it has been in 150 years and proud of seals and the occasional whale, sometimes alive. In cities from Chicago to provincial China, dirty riverside warehouses have been turned into restaurants and apartments.

But rivers also need to regain their original purpose as transport centers. Cities are shifting more traffic back to the river—but this time cleanly and silently, using the coming generation of electric ferries. Ferries already transport 2.1 billion passengers a year. Numbers have been rising in San Francisco, New York and Sydney, while London plans to double its annual total of riders to 20 million by 2035.

Imagine using the huge capacity of shipping to take delivery trucks off the roads. One of the newer Thames boat with a capacity of 1,750 tons can replace 44 large trucks. Even without being electric-powered, it uses much less energy per ton and causes less noise pollution.

In other words, we need to turn truck drivers into boat captains. Delivery companies will need to build new distribution centres on cheap riverside land. When their boats stop at the new downtown wharves, electric cargo bikes will deliver packages the last mile.

Boat-to-bike is more complicated than delivery by truck, because it adds a stage. You might have to pay more to get your parcels the same day. As for the advantage, it will unblock city centres. Rivers are the reason our cities are where they are. We just forgot about them.

【推荐1】The most successful people all have certain habits in their daily routines. These habits help contribute to their success. Forming a new good habit can be a struggle, but it is well worth the effort.    1    

Set your goal.

Before you can begin to work on your new habit, figure out exactly what you hope to accomplish.    2    Make sure that your goal is specific, measurable and realistic to increase your chances of success.

    3    

It is important to choose the habits that are most likely to help you achieve your goal. After you have set your goal and worked out all the specifics of achieving that goal, identify a habit that is part of achieving that goal. Consider what good habit would help you accomplish that goal.

Consider your motivation.

Once you have identified your goal and the new habit you need to accomplish this goal, then take some time to consider your motivation.    4    It is your good motivation that can help you change from possible failure to certain success with your new habit.

Give yourself time.

Forming a new habit can take a long time. Some people can form a new habit in as little as a few weeks, while other people will take several months. As you work to form your new habit, just keep in mind that it may be a while before it comes true.    5    

In her new book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, tells the story of Tom, a high-school student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who decides to spend his senior year in Warsaw, Poland. Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the past decade, the country raised students’ test scores from significantly below average to well above it. Polish kids have now outscored(超过……分数) American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Warsaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

That American high schools waste more time and money on sports than on math is an old complaint. This is not a matter of how any given student who plays sports does in school, but of the culture and its priorities. This December, when the latest Program for International Student Assessment(PISA) results are announced, it’s safe to predict that American high-school students will once again display their limited skills in math and reading, outscored not just by students in Poland but also by students in places like South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, and Japan. Meanwhile, they will have played some very exciting football games, which will have been breathlessly written up in their hometown papers.

Why does this situation continue? Well, for one thing, kids like it. And for another, according to Ripley, parents seem to like the arrangement, too. She describes a tour she took of a school in Washington D.C., which costs thirty thousand dollars a year. The tour leader—a mother with three children in the school—was asked about the school’s flaws(瑕疵). When she said that the math program was weak, none of the parents taking the tour reacted. When she said that the football program was weak, the parents suddenly became concerned. “Really?” one of them asked worriedly, “What do you mean?”

One of the ironies(讽刺) of the situation is that sports reveal what is possible. American kids’ performance on the field shows just how well they can do when expectations are high. It’s too bad that their test scores show the same thing.

【推荐2】It’s possible to be straightforward about climate change with our children and protect their emotional well-being.     1    . So they don’t have to despair over the future.

Don’t overdo the news

Although adults may want to watch and listen to the news, a little goes a long way for children. There’s a difference between being prepared and being overwhelmed (不知所措), especially for kids.     2    . For example, when you have anxious kids watching the TV or anxious families, you may see a growth in kids’ anxiety; in other words, when parents watch TV a lot in a sorrowful atmosphere, they’re hurting their children. It’s the responsibility of parents and caregivers to control their kids’ media consumption; they simply do not need to know everything.

    3    

As in all areas of parenting, it’s up to caregivers to assess how much their kid can take. If you know your child is more anxious than the next kid or has a sensitive character, you have to parent differently. It’s not so much about keeping kids away from every bit of information about rising temperatures and extinction, it’s that you handle it differently.     4    .

Emphasize agency

At home or in school, parents and educators can pair environmental studies with actionable steps such as having kids organize a challenge to increase the number of students bringing reusable bottles to school. They also can help students research how many species have thrived (茁壮成长) under the Endangered Species Act.     5    . Families can support an environmental organization, plan a park cleanup or host a bake sale to raise money for habitat preservation of a kid’s favorite endangered animal.

【推荐3】Everyone knows about straight-A students. We see them frequently in TV situation comedies and in movies like Revenge of the Nerds. They get high grades, all right, but only by becoming dull laborers, their noses always stuck in a book. They are not good at social communication and look clumsy while doing sports.

How, then, do we account for Domenica Roman or Paul Melendres?

Roman is on the tennis team at Fairmont Senior High School. She also sings in the choral group, serves on the student council and is a member of the mathematics society. For two years she has maintained A's in every subject. Melendres, a freshman at the University of New Mexico, was student body president at Valley High School in Albuquerque. He played soccer and basketball well, exhibited at the science fair, and meanwhile worked as a reporter on a local television station. Being a speech giver at the graduation ceremony, he achieved straight A's in. his regular classes, plus bonus points for A's in two college-level courses.

How do super-achievers like Roman and Melendres do it? Brains aren't the only answer. “Top grades don't always go to the brightest students,” declares Herbert Walberg, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has conducted major studies on super-achieving students. “Knowing how to make the most of your innate abilities counts for more. Much more.”

In fact, Walberg says, students with high IQ sometimes don't do as well as classmates with lower IQ. For them, learning comes too easily and they never find out how to get down.

Hard work isn't the whole story, either. “It's not how long you sit there with the books open,” said one of the many straight-A students we interviewed. “It's what you do while you're sitting.” Indeed, some of these students actually put in fewer hours of homework time than their lower-scoring classmates.

The kids at the top of the class get there by mastering a few basic techniques that others can readily learn.